Published 09:23 a.m., Friday, June 24, 2011

After 2 1/2 years as Apple's interim CEO, Steve Jobs has finally dropped the "interim" from his title.

But he liked the "i" in his old title so much, he told a cheering crowd at the opening of the Macworld Expo at the Moscone Center yesterday, that he has decided to keep it. From now on, he said, he'll be iCEO.

As in iMac and iBook, the company's hot-selling desktop and portable models, "i" is for Internet, and Jobs followed up on that theme by announcing a series of new free services on Apple's already heavily traveled Web site.

He also showed off a slick new user interface for the company's next-generation operating system, which he said will go on sale this summer, and previewed new marketing campaigns focused on "desktop movies," Apple's term for digital video.

Jobs said the resurgent company sold 1.35 million Macs in the last three

months of 1999 -- more than in any other quarter in its history.

Pending Apple's quarterly financial report, due in two weeks, he disclosed no financial results from the quarter's operations, but did boast that a $12.5 million investment Apple made in August in Akamai, a Massachusetts company that provides high-speed servers for streaming video and e-commerce, is now worth more than $1 billion.

He also said Apple has invested $200 million in EarthLink, the nation's second-largest Internet service provider, and will make it the first choice for new Mac customers seeking an ISP. The service won't carry an Apple brand, but Apple will receive a share of the revenue from each new Mac user signing up with EarthLink.

Topping the list of new services, called iTools, at Apple's Web site is one called KidSafe, which is designed to keep children from venturing into inappropriate areas of the Internet. Instead of attempting to identify and block access to objectionable sites -- the approach used by so-called filtering software -- the Apple solution limits children to sites approved by a panel of teachers and librarians.

Other new services at the site include e-mail accounts and personal Web sites (with a mac.com address), online Web-page design tools and 20 megabytes of free disk space on secure Apple servers for each registered user.

Similar features, also free, are already available to both Mac and Windows users through a variety of other Web sites. But Apple's services will be more smoothly integrated with the Mac OS.

Jobs called this integration between the Apple servers and users' desktops "taking unfair advantage of owning the client OS." The downside is that the iTools work only with Mac OS 9, the current version of the company's operating system, which has been on the market only since October.

A few new services at the Apple site will be available to users of earlier versions of the Mac OS and other operating systems, too. They include iCards, an electronic greeting- card service, and iReviews, where Apple will review useful Web sites, organized into 15 categories, and invite users to post their own comments and ratings.

In the next few months, Jobs said, much of Apple's marketing will focus on desktop movies -- "a killer application if ever there was one."

The company's celebrated "Think Different" advertising campaign will be revived, this time featuring cinema legends such as Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, Stanley Kubrick and Francis Coppola. And Apple will launch TV ads -- previewed for the Expo crowd -- featuring digital home movies that an Apple vice president made of his young children and their hamster and collie.

The longest section of Jobs' 2- hour, 20-minute presentation was devoted to Mac OS X (pronounced OS 10), which features a look Jobs called "liquid." (One of the design goals, he said, was that "when you saw it, you'd want to lick it.") For the new system, Apple has redesigned the Finder, its desktop file- management application, adding new icons and a search field to every window.

Apple declined to set a price for the new operating system but said it would release it for sale this summer and begin preinstalling it on all new Macs a year from now. While the new OS is supposed to run nearly all existing Mac applications, executives from such companies as Adobe, Microsoft, Palm and Quark took the stage to promise new versions of their products to take advantage of the new Apple software. In addition to his Apple responsibilities, Jobs will stay on as CEO of Point Richmond's Pixar.